All About Me (apparently)

The Basic Bits ;)

Ok, I think I should start with the very very basics. I'm a thirty-something History graduate (2:1 wth honours) from the University of Kent (formerly UKC ;)). So yea, that's all fairly normal. I am currently at Canterbury Christchurch training as a secondary school history teacher (and jobseeking!), which, despite sometimes being percieved as slighty stupid is still seen as rather normal ;)

What is unusual for a girl, and, even more so for a history graduate is that I am also a geek, and not just in the classic reads too much (especially fantasy), and watches SciFi on TV...I am a computer geek ;) More on that down the page somewhere

So on top of all this weirdness we put my friends (just kidding,they're all lovely and not a bit weirder than I), my family (more specifically my sister, E and my mamma, Christine [now deceased]), and my lovely husband, ben. Wedding piccies here :)

To be honest, at the moment, my life rocks :)

Some History

Well, lets start at the beginning ;) I was born just in time for lunch on Monday 7th November 1983 and my sister arrived in time for the 9 O'clock news (or so I've been told) on the 26th August 1987.

My father died when I was 8, early in the morning of 25th December 1991. After that lots of things changed. We eventually, despite having been mormons all my life, stopped going to church and, about a year ago, I stopped being a mormon altogether. More information on my life as a Mormon and my exit is here.

The first few years after my father died could never be described as easy, but we pulled together as a family and it turns out what "they" say is true - what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger ;)

I went to Chipstead Valley Primary School till 1995 when I went to High School. I loved CVPS and for me it was a fantastic first school.

High School was a bit of a trauma for me really beacuse all my friends from Primary School went to other High Schools and I was bullied, but I eventally found my own feet and I left Woodcote High School in 2000 with 10 GCSE's including an A* in music and an A in History and even (I was completely shocked) a B in Mathematics. A typical Hums student, I'm rather poor at anything other than basic maths (and some would say I'm bad at that too ;))

I did my AS and A-Levels at Reigate College and finally ended up at Kent studying History.

Now I've graduated and am currently at Christchurch University, also in Canterbury, doing my PGCE. The problem with Canterbury is that when you arrive you find you can never leave, though this is in part due to the wonderful support network I've built up here. I met Ben here and most of my current friends here, including the wonderful Holland family who have been amazingly supportive, even when I was horrendously late on more than one occasion...*

*Thinking about it, not killing the children may have been a start towards me keeping the job for all three years of my degree ;)

My Life As A Geek

I suppose, looking back on it, I've been a closet geek for many years.

I was into fantasy books and SciFi things and was interested in how things worked.

I enjoyed building things and, when I could, I enjoyed surfing the internet, yet these things were not really very unusual among my peers and it was comparitively late, my first year of University that I started to become a full blown geek with an interest in computers

I was very lonely and homesick my first few months of Uni and it was partly because of this that I came to use IRC and, through the internal IRC network, met a good number of my current friends.

It is largely through them that I came to build my own computer and start to use Linux, or, more specifically Debian.

Well, it's been more than 3 years...and I'm still using Debian, except now I'm using it exclusively having blown away my windows partition a while ago. It's certainly a steep learning curve, but one well worth doing in my opinion. I always find it really rewarding ;)

A while ago I wrote some documentation on using IRSSI and Screen for fun and cos I was bored

I'm such a geek...

What's more...I'm proud of it :D

My Music

Music means a lot to me. It's how I can express my emotions and it's how I can feel closer to God and sometimes it even helps me to understand myself.

When I was little I couldn't express myself in quite this way but I still knew I loved music and I started to study properly in year 3 of Primary School, learning the Violin and the Recorder. I dropped the latter at when I finished CVPS, but continued with the Violin and Vocal lessons, which I began when I was 9ish.

I won many prizes and certificates when I was growing up for my singing and I miss it now, but once I reached my teenage years I realised I wasn't good enough to have music as a career. Despite this, it means a lot to me and is still a central point to my life :)